Rick Perry the Pander Bear threatens Bernanke to impress the Tea Party girls.

Texas Governor Rick Perry put his hat in the ring one day and followed it up by putting his boot in his mouth the next day.  He threatened Fed chairman Ben Bernanke with "ugly treatment down in Texas" and even called him a traitor.  The only part he left out was a wink wink reminder of how the good Christian judges down in Texas sentence horse theives and bankers who print too much currency.

"Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treacherous — or treasonous in my opinion,” Mr. Perry said Monday, taking a voter’s question about the Fed and criticizing the possibility of the central bank’s taking further steps between now and the election to keep interest rates low.

He added, “I don’t know what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas.”

I think the part that the Tea Partiers and the candidates who suck up to the Tea Partiers are failing to see is that each piece of the economy is largely dependent on the rest of the economy and that social order and civilization itself is dependent on that economy. If you let a large chunk of the economy die off, the rest of it does not proceed unabated. Its all interrelated and co-dependent. If things come to a grinding halt, they will not come back. We can't let that happen unless we really want to witness Armageddon happen in front of us.

The economy is based on confidence. Confidence that it will all continue to function even through economic and social disruptions.  Enough confidence to participate by exchanging your time, labor or talent for some form of currency that can then be traded for other desired goods and services.  Without confidence there can be no currency and without an economy there can be no civilization, just tribalism. 

Its not much of a secret that a main strategy of Tea Party politics is to chop away at confidence in the Fed, and our economy to convince voters to unelect President Obama in 2012.  But in doing so they risk doing real damage to the economy that won't be so easy to fix even if they win the office.  Once you kill consumer confidence, its not always simple getting it back.

Rick Perry was doing that here.  Tossing red meat to the "sub-intelligent and proud of it GOP base" by  ridiculing and threatening the Fed. He figures once he gets to be President all that confidence will come back and the economy will start humming again.  What he doesn't seem to see is that most of the American economy doesn't have the ability to withstand a prolonged recession.  It won't be there on the other side. So if the Fed has to ease monetary restrictions or whatever they call it, I'm OK with it if it is my best alternative to the loss of civilization and social order. 

Perry is a political sleazeball and I can't tell at which point the pandering to dumb people stops.